Friday, January 1, 2010

I managed to hit the one-game-per-day threshold just barely this year. Gaming with the kids has continued to progress, and that's allowed us to start hosting more gaming. Hopefully, lots more in 2010. There's still lots of good gaming at lunch at work, though my personal amount of play has gone down a bit. Race and Dominion dominated again, and overall another good year of gaming.

My kids are great gamers. My 5-year-old now plays real games, and is beginning to learn some actual tactics, and my 3-year-old finally has enough patience for an extended (ie 20 minute) game. Non-kids' games successfully played with kids include: Quoridor, Twixt, Zig Zag, Chess, Pitch Car, Pingvinas, Blokus Trigon, Dvonn, and a variety of others, focused on abstracts.

Overall Stats

365 Games Played

44% at home (family & guests)

15% at work

22% regular gaming group

12% "events" (eg, Unity Games)

7% other friends' homes

192 different Titles

141 days with at least one game played

54 new-to-me games played

Gamed with 162 different people

33 new games or expansions acquired

Top Games

44 games of Race for the Galaxy

43 games of Dominion

9 games of Electronic Catchphrase

8 games of Connect Four

7 games of Viva Topo!

6 games of Loopin' Louie

5 games of Quoridor

5 games of The Adventurers

5 games of Go Away Monster!

New Games

The kids' game success of the year was clearly Viva Topo!which I picked up at Danger Planet when they had their store closing clearance. It's a nice push your luck race game, which is a mechanic that works well with kids.

Among the adult games, only the expansions for Raceand Dominion really stand out. Three Commandments, The Adventurers, Ghost Stories and At the Gates of Loyang were all very good, but none are breakout hits.

I have been tracking the games I play now for 10 years. I tracked games some in '97, '98 and '99, but didn't start keeping really good records until 2000. In this past decade, I played:

4480 games: 1.2 games/day

1060 titles: 2 new titles/week

1267 different days: 2.4 days/week

with 977 different people: 8 new people/month

Top People

Of the top ten people (by number of games played) my wife and daughter are #1 and #10. Of the remaining eight, two (FR & ET) are folks I game with every month, two are people I've gamed with many times a year for the entire decade (RS & SD) and four are four are people who I gamed with a lot and then they moved away.

Only four games got played every year of the decade, because well, a lot of great games came out during the past decade. Those four are Igel Argern, Can't Stop, 6 nimmt! and Ra. A bunch of games managed to hit 9/10 years though: Medici, Knockabout, Crokinole, Basari, Battle Line, Call my Bluff, Lord of the Rings, For Sale, Zirkus Flohcati, Speed, Electronic Catchphrase & Apples to Apples.

Personal

Professional

I am a Engineering Director at Google. My team and I work on Search.

Previously, I was the CTO at an 802.11 location and security company, Newbury Networks in Boston. In June, 1999 I received my Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. I graduated from MIT (undergraduate) in June, 1997, in physics. Prior to that I was CTO of net.Genesis from 1994 to 1996.